As a nonprofit organization, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) supports the development of prosperous, healthy, and resilient communities by transforming the built environment. One of the key initiatives in the effort to build a better future is the USGBC education platform, a comprehensive online resource and learning hub designed to provide high-quality educational content on green building practices.
This platform serves a diverse audience, covering different aspects of the green building certification process, from introductory topics to specialized subjects, and even K-12 content for growing minds.
When you visit the current USGBC Education tab on their website, you’re met with clean visuals, organized modules, and an intuitive user experience. It wasn’t always this way.
Before partnering with our technology experts, the education platform needed to be visually and functionally updated so the site could better serve its users and more accurately reflect the outcome-oriented nature of USGBC’s mission, content, and purpose.
The Background: What is the USGBC Education Platform?
USGBC proudly offers over a thousand curated educational courses for professionals pursuing careers in sustainability, green building enthusiasts, teachers, and more.
These courses fulfill continuing education (CE) requirements, inform Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) professionals, and inspire leaders in K-12 and higher education who want to improve their understanding of green building strategies and advance the movement.
However, in its former iteration, both USGBC and its users faced a few pain points:
- The educational content was siloed into two homes, separating the K-12 resources from the main course library.
- Image cards appeared blurry and lacked a clear, recognizable branding presence.
- Users had to self-report their participation and earned achievements, requiring the USGBC team to use a manual, time-consuming quality check for CE credit fulfillment.
- USGBC needed to build and implement a grading system to validate efforts for people pursuing CE hours.
The previous educational platform, although functional and informative, was run with older technology and maintained through a third-party organization. The USGBC team asked, “Why not create our own platform and help educate more people worldwide with different sustainability-related courses?”
That’s exactly what we helped them do.
The Vision: Enter our Specialists
USGBC’s ultimate goal hinged on educating more people, spreading knowledge and sustainability awareness, and broadening their audience to help further their mission: Sustainability for life — even in education.
Since USGBC offers a multitude of industry-specific proficiencies and certifications through their platform, their team wanted to create a one-stop shop where users could prove their knowledge, earn green building badges, maintain required CE hours, and explore exam prep resources before test day.
In addition to providing a seamless user experience for everyone accessing the site, implementing a cohesive brand presence across the platform was a top priority among USGBC’s teams.
These three main goals — 1) Bring all of the existing and upcoming content together under one portal 2) Build a system to verify and streamline CE fulfillment, and 3) Apply an updated, consistent brand strategy to the visual components of the platform — guided our team’s reconstructive approach to enhancing USGBC’s educational platform and experience.
The Plan: Combining Strategy and Production
It was clear that cross-team collaboration would be key to completing this project. Between our tech experts and USGBC’s marketing, business, education, and design teams, we planned to rebuild the platform from the ground up, prioritizing usability, efficiency, and unification.
Let’s get technical. Here’s how we rebuilt the platform from a developer's point of view:
For the backend of the platform (the data and infrastructure that make your application work), our tech team used Drupal, a popular and customizable open-source content-management system (CMS) software built to scale alongside your business. Drupal is a vital tool for powering complex, large-scale websites where flexibility, security, and efficiency are crucial.
When it was time to build the front-end of the platform (what users see and interact with), our team applied React, an open-sourced JavaScript library known for its component-based architecture, performance optimization, and strong developer community. With React, our team can build anything from single-page applications to more robust, enterprise-grade web applications specifically tailored to each company’s business needs.
The combination of these high-powered developer tools enabled our tech experts to integrate more interactive elements into the course/module structure. Which, in turn, helped USGBC’s team validate, monitor, and automatically report education-based achievements.
Now, in addition to watching the required video content, users must complete (and successfully pass) a series of quizzes before earning their CE hours or specialized certificate.
Here’s a brief overview of how our team planned to accomplish this task:
- Build the platform that would host the various course modules
- Create the assessment/quiz elements and logic that are attached to the courses
- Account for topics with multi-step assessments by building a more complex reporting matrix
- Automatically report earned CE hours and certifications on a pass/fail basis to the user’s account
The Outcome: Implementation and Impact
After a rigorous planning period and extensive cross-team collaboration, our team and USGBC teams completely restructured and rebuilt the educational platform from the ground up.
Older content and the K-12 educational courses (formerly known as Learning Lab) were brought into the new framework, we built an assessment feature and folded it into both returning and net-new content, USGBC’s visual brand identity was extended across all visual elements of the new platform, and all user work would be automatically logged in real-time.
As an added bonus, our team also created a personalized recommendation module that curates other related or relevant courses based on a user’s site history. For example, people pursuing a certificate to prove their mastery in indoor air quality will then have smart ventilation webinars and healthy schools fact sheets suggested to them in their customized course finder.
With everything coming together under one easily navigable platform, this partnership has been able to inspire more people to do more work that will benefit our environment and future generations' lives.
But the impact doesn’t stop there. The updated education platform now serves as a primary benefit for USGBC members and credential holders. Whether users are seasoned members or new to the green building movement, there’s a subscription plan available that fits every budget–and generates a solid source of revenue to further the green building movement.
Accessing the education platform is not only easier but more affordable than before. Users can purchase a la carte courses, individual series (10-15 courses), an annual education subscription, or unlimited access through a USGBC membership. If buying a course isn’t the right fit, users can still access over 400 free courses and resources to start their green building journey.
Overcoming Challenges
Accomplishing major milestones inevitably comes with a fair share of difficult challenges. While we successfully transformed USGBC’s education platform, we also faced a unique set of challenges that were necessary to address throughout the process.
Let’s discuss a few collective highs and moments for growth during our process:
- Key Milestone: Defining the project scope
With multiple stakeholders invested in the progress of this project, discovering common goals and getting everyone on the same page was imperative to seeing the vision become a reality. Clear communication and organized cross-team collaboration were the backbone of a strong foundation to later build upon.
- Key Milestone: Building quiz modules and complex logic matrices
Establishing a system to verify efforts helped save a considerable amount of time and resources for both USGBC staff and users. After some trial and error, we were able to execute an invaluable addition to the education platform within the needed parameters.
- Key Milestone: Migrating to React
Utilizing React for the front-end layer opened up new possibilities and functionalities to our team. With this tool in our digital toolbox, we were able to optimize performance and interaction with the backend and APIs, ensuring the platform functions at peak performance without lagging or breaking.
We know that new challenges may arise over time as a company’s needs and goals evolve. That’s why we prioritize built-in scalability and room for easy maintenance. With the help of USGBC’s team, we created a forms system for potential educational partners and content providers to submit their data for consideration to be approved and published in the course directory.
From adding more net-new courses to amending older articles with updated data, USGBC can rest assured they’re providing accurate, high-quality content to all users while our understanding of science and technology inevitably progresses.
